The trouble was that once she was out of the room, there was no telling in what direction she went — left to the great cavern, or right to the dark narrow opening in the wall and the two closed doors further down the passage.
Kate did not dare to follow her when she went out the next morning. The most she could do was fall back on the trick of counting to see exactly how long she was away. It was no longer than it took Kate to reach thirty: say, roughly, fifteen counts to get to her destination and fifteen to come back again.
Later, when the day's work was over and the scrubbers were returning to their stable, Kate made another count, this time in the passage.
That settled it. The nearest of the two closed doors was forty-one counts down the passage from the food place, even without doubling the number to allow for the return. Fifteen would carry Gwenhyfara only as far as the dark narrow opening in one direction, or else the great cavern in the other. And she could not have gone to the cavern, not possibly. Kate herself would have seen anybody who was kept there. It was the dark narrow opening, then. There was nothing else left for it to be.
Fortunately, Gwenhyfara never lingered in the stable after she had seen Joan and Betty and Marian and Kate safe in their velvet stalls. Kate watched the flaming points of her candlebranch dwindle to sparks and vanish as they moved off down the passage; then, with a sigh of relief, she slipped back into her fur-lined robe and crept from the room, feeling her way along the wall in the darkness.
She was by now so familiar with the path to the cavern that she was not afraid of getting lost; the chief danger was that she might encounter one of the Fairy Folk or be taken by a sudden attack of the weight. But for once the luck seemed to be with her. The weight held off and nobody appeared to question or send her back, not even when she stumbled over a step that she could not see and loosed a shower of echoes from the hollow rock all around her. She crept by the two closed doors and then moved across to the opposite wall, groping for the narrow opening on the left.
The narrow opening was, as she had thought, the entrance to another passage. After three or four steps, it turned sharply to the left again; and she was just feeling her way cautiously around the corner when she heard a sound that brought her up short, frozen to the wall. Somewhere in the darkness ahead of her a voice was speaking.
The voice was very low, and so stumbling and broken that it was unrecognizable. It was an instant before she even caught the words and realized that it was not speaking to her.
"Help me," it said in an agonized whisper. "Help me. O my dear Lord Christ, make me able to bear it."
Then it died away, and there was a complete silence.
Kate flattened herself against the rock, hardly daring to breathe. She felt as if she had broken unforgivably into somebody's private room and did not know how to get out again. Her first thought was simply to keep him from finding out that she was there at all. She did not want him even to wonder if by some chance she might have overheard him.
It was not until the silence had gone on for a long while that she finally took a step forward, bringing her foot down hard and dragging the hem of her robe rustlingly along the wall to warn him.
Christopher said, steadily now but more grimly than she had ever heard him speak:
"Have you come back again? This isn't your time."
"Christopher?" said Kate, wondering who he thought she was. "It's Kate, Christopher. Where are you?"
"Kate?"
"Kate Sutton."
There was a cry from the darkness.
"No!" said Christopher — and then, like a man driven beyond all endurance: "Oh, good Lord! What are you doing here?"
Chapter X
"Neither Sun nor Moon"
Kate stood still. She had sometimes, lying in her bed or washing down the floor of the cavern, comforted herself with the thought of this meeting; but on those occasions, the first words Christopher spoke had always been entirely different. "Master John caught me at the Holy Well, and the Lady brought me here to be one of the scrubbers," she informed him, in her stiffest manner. "I couldn't find out where they were keeping you until now. And I do think," she added, "that you might at the least say you were happy to see me."
"Happy!" retorted Christopher. "What would you do if you met your best friend in hell? Say you were happy to know he was there too, and isn't the pitch hot? Stop nattering and come here to me. I can't get any nearer to you because of the mesh."
"What mesh?" Kate demanded, groping her way forward. The next instant she was brought to a halt as if by a solid wall.
A row of thick wooden stakes had been set across the whole width of the passage, blocking it from floor to roof. The stakes were sunk in the rock, and the spaces between them were filled with a closely woven net of tough bark strips or withy, interlaced like basket work. Kate ran a dismayed hand along the intricate knots that lashed the mesh to the bars. "Isn't there any way through?" she asked.
"There must be a door in it somewhere, but I've never found it," said Christopher. "And a sort of little window to the left where they give me my food. I don't know if you can open it."
Kate tried, but there seemed to be no bolt or latch or handle anywhere and the window had been so cunningly fitted that she could not even feel the joins in the stakes and the basket work.
"One of their tricks," said Christopher briefly. "No matter. We can talk well enough as it is. Stay low to the floor and keep your voice down."
"Are they likely to hear us?"
"Not very likely. There's never anyone moving about this hour of the night — by 'night' meaning the time when they're quiet and I don't see lights going back and forth in the outer passage so I call it 'night' in a manner of speaking, but heaven alone can tell what it really is. This place is worse than the one in the ballad, where they had neither sun nor moon and had to go by the roaring of the sea."
"I know," said Kate, settling herself on the stone of the floor as close to the mesh as she could. She heard Christopher move in the darkness on the other side, and then felt the mesh stir a little at her shoulder as if he had leaned his own shoulder against it.
"Where are you?" he whispered.
"Here," said Kate.
"Good. Now! Tell me. What's been happening? Where's Cecily? Have you seen her? Did they send her to Geoffrey?"
"No, but she's safe at the Hall. They're planning to give her to Sir Geoffrey with some tale or other when he comes back after All Saints' Day. But never mind that. I'll tell you later, after we're out of here. This door in the mesh, Christopher. Couldn't you break it down if you tried?"
"Now who's talking as though I were King Arthur in a romance?"
"But couldn't you?" Kate insisted, remembering the grip of the hands that had dragged her away from the Holy Well. "This thing is only made of wood, not iron or steel; and as soon as I find out how the passages are marked so that we won't get lost, couldn't you — "
"No," said Christopher flatly. "Stop it, Kate. They'd only take Cecily again if I did."
"They won't be able to, once Sir Geoffrey comes back."
"Everything will be over and done with long before Geoffrey comes back."
"No, it won't. Christopher, listen. You don't understand. There's something else. I saw Randal."
She heard him catch his breath.
"Ah!" he said very softly; and then: "Did you? How? I thought you said Master John and the Lady had you."
Kate told him about the window in Master John's evidence room.
" — and I'm still not certain that Randal knows just what I meant by All Hallows' Eve," she ended apologetically. "But it can't have done any harm. Sir Geoffrey's sure to come as soon as he has the letter. I thought it was safer to gamble on it than to argue with him."
"Don't fash yourself over that," said Christopher. "What else can you call this whole business but a gamble from start to finish? I seem to have been playing pretty freely with your money too, haven't I? O Lord, I wish I'd never dragged you into this coil, Ka
te! I'm sorry."
"Why should you be? You tried hard enough to keep me out of it," said Kate tartly. "You and your conscience! One of these days you're going to start trying to carry the whole world on your own back, and then God won't have any more work to do."
"One of these days your husband is going to beat you," said Christopher between his teeth. "And if I could only get out of this foul hole, how gladly I would save that poor unfortunate man the trouble!"
"Is it really a foul hole?" asked Kate anxiously.
"No, except in a manner of speaking. There's a bed and another little room at the back for washing and a rush mat on the floor that I'm sitting on now, and once a day — if 'day' you can call it — a pretty girl brings me my porridge and leaves a light out there in the passage for as long as it takes me to eat and clean myself up."
"Gwenhyfara," said Kate.
"Is that her name? I didn't know. She's never said a word to me because I'm dead."
"What?"
"Dead."
"Oh, don't be so silly, Christopher! You're not dead."
"Thank you: I was beginning to wonder myself. I only wish the People of the Hill agreed with you."
"What do you mean?"
"Didn't the Lady tell you? In the old days, once they chose a man to pay the teind, they shut him in here for the last nine weeks before All Hallows' Eve to be trained and prepared, so that when the time came he would go freely — even willingly — without trying to hold any part of himself back. The 'death service' was what they called it long ago, when the King of the land did it. To their way of thinking, he was dead from the moment he entered this place, or at least couldn't be treated as if he were even in the world any longer. Everyone was strictly forbidden to touch him, and nobody was allowed to speak to him except the Guardian of the Well."
"Is that another name for the Lady?"
"No. The Guardian is the one you saw at the Well that night, the one who took me. When I came to my senses, I was lying on my bed in this place, and he was over somewhere beyond the mesh — like you, only on the other side of the passage — and whispering to me in the dark. He was telling me about the old days, and what it was that had to be done to a teind-payer while he was practising death. He comes back on some of the nights, as soon as that girl takes the light away, and sits over there in the dark again."
"But what for? What is it that he does to you?"
"Nothing much." She knew from the tone of his voice that he was not going to tell her anything else. "What it is that has to be done to a teind-payer. But that's why they've never liked to use a child to pay the teind — no child can go through with a nine weeks' death service, and so the power gets lost or wasted. The Fairy Folk think — "
"I don't care what the Fairy Folk think!" Kate broke in on him indignantly. "I think it's abominable! Just as if you were a goose in a cage being fattened for a dinner!"
Christopher gave a sudden gasp and then burst out into helpless laughter. He laughed and laughed, and went on laughing wildly.
"It is like that, isn't it?" he choked. "I never thought of it before."
"I wasn't trying to jeer at you," Kate protested, horrified at what she had done.
"I know you weren't, sweetheart," said Christopher. "But when it comes to the day of judgment, I only hope I can get somewhere near you in the crowd."
"Why?"
"I want to know how you'll describe the proceedings."
"That isn't the point." Kate was in no mood to laugh, and she did not see that there was anything to laugh at. "They are using you abominably."
"They don't see it as the goose would." Christopher was still laughing. "Didn't I tell you they were using me like a King of the land in the old days? Though why anyone should have wanted to be a King of the land in the old days I cannot conceive."
"Christopher."
"Yes?"
"Will you tell me one thing? I wouldn't ask you, only — I — it's worse in a way. Not knowing."
There was a moment's pause. Then Christopher said:
"What is it?"
"Did they say how they were going to do it — on All Hallows' Eve?"
"Up at the Standing Stone. You remember, that big rock on the path to the Holy Well? That's where it was always done in the old days. They use the ashes afterwards for spells and charms. It's one of their four great yearly festivals. The other three — "
"Ashes?" Kate interrupted him sharply. "What ashes?"
"From the burning."
"What burning?"
"When I was a boy at home in Norfolk," said Christopher, "we young folk always lit a great fire in the fields on All Hallows' Eve, and then threw in a figure of a man made of the last harvest's straw. The chaplain didn't like us to do it, but it was a very old custom and he was never able to stop us. We called it 'burning the payer.' None of us thought that in the old days the man might not have been made out of straw."
There was another long pause, and then Kate said, with her voice sticking in her throat: "Not — not — made out of — "
"Randal must be well on his way to Geoffrey by this time," said Christopher. "Keep that clearly in your mind, will you? And as for the burning: well, it seems to have been the customary manner of offering a sacrifice to the gods among the heathen British that the Romans found here when they first came to England. I remember reading about it at school. It's in Caesar somewhere."
"But that — " said Kate numbly, "that was almost sixteen hundred years ago."
"What's sixteen hundred years to them? There must be ice lying in some northern caves that's older yet — and why should it ever melt as long as it keeps to a cold hidden place where the sun can't reach it? They don't have to go by our time here, Kate. They can go by a time of their own, as the ice does."
From somewhere in the distance there came a sharp silvery sound, like a bell striking once. It was followed, almost instantly, by a dull rumbling roar that rushed along the outer passage and then died away. Kate rose to her knees, startled. "What's that?" she asked.
"I don't know," said Christopher. "If we were at home in Norfolk, I'd say someone was sending water over a spillway to ease the pressure on a dam, but down here God alone knows what it may be. The Guardian won't tell me. It does sound like the roaring of the sea, doesn't it?"
"Yes," said Kate.
"I hear it every night. Afterwards, they're always quiet for a little longer, and then I begin to see the lights moving back and forth again. You'd best go now, Kate. They mustn't find you running about where you have no business to be."
Kate scrambled to her feet.
"I can come tomorrow," she said.
"What's the risk to you?"
"You're a fine one to talk of taking risks," Kate retorted. "And anyway, there's no risk. I can come easily. Every night, if you want me."
"Men dying of thirst have often been known to want a drink of water," said Christopher. "Very well, then. Get back safe to your bed, Kate, and rest well."
Kate got back safe to her bed, but she did not rest well. It was a long time before she slept at all, and when she did, the sleep was broken and restless, filled with confused dreams of bird shapes rising and falling through circles of flame. The next morning she could not seem to take her eyes away from the lighted candles ranged against the wall behind the Lady's stone chair, or the lighted candles circling around the cavern as the Fairy Folk entered it. Watching the beautiful procession sweep in and then out was ordinarily the only pleasure of her day; but on this particular day, she was unable to see anything clearly except the little points of flame streaming up from the blazing wicks to lose themselves in the shadows cast by the rock overhead.
She was standing in her usual place at the door when the Lady finally came down the hall, the two youths with their branches of candles before her, the People of the Hill forming in order behind. The points of fire lifted and wheeled like birds in flight and began, very slowly, to move forward.
Kate stood watching the long burning line come
down on her, one flame after another, all burning — the word went tearing through her brain like a scream: burning, burning, burning, burning — and then suddenly the points of fire blurred and ran staggeringly together, and with a cry she lurched back against the wall in such a blind rush of suffocated horror as she had until now felt only during her worst attacks of the weight.
"Not here, you fool!" she thought frantically, as another wave of thundering darkness broke over her and went by. "Not here!" She would have to stay on her feet at least until the Lady had gone by; she would have to. The mist was beginning to clear from her eyes. She drew a deep shivering breath and forced herself to look up.
The Lady was standing within a yard of her, very erect and still, the two youths on either side lifting their branches of candles to let the lights fall on Kate's face.
"Why have you broken the order of my hall with this confusion?" said the Lady. Kate did not answer. It was as much as she could do to hang where she was, limp as a scarecrow, propped against the wall.
"Can you hear what I say?"
Kate nodded.
"Then listen to me," said the Lady. "I have told you before, and I tell you now again, that it is not given to your kind to live as we do. Why should you torment yourself to no purpose? With the Young Lord I can understand it, for he is not in the common run of men, and he would have been a King of the land in the old days. But you I do not understand. He has only a short time of pain to endure, and by enduring it he will give power to many and save the child that is dear to him. But your time will not be short, and you will get nothing from it. You cannot hope to escape, for without light and the signs not even we can find our way among the passages of the Hill; and you cannot hope to be rescued, for I tell you plainly that if Geoffrey Heron or any mortal man comes into this place to take it by force, I will destroy you and every other prisoner I hold before I will give them up to him. All you can look for — the rest of your days — is to serve and to drudge, to scrub stone on your knees, to live like a beast, to toil and be weary and in the end to die. Is not that the truth of the matter?"